In the Verse
by Ari Vela
Summary: "It is a social coping device, he would tell her, an anthropological leveling mechanism meant to separate our instinctual habits from our animalistic fellows. A badge that we give to hormonal impulses simply because they are human."
1. Universal Truths

**NOTE: This is a rewrite. After re-reading the first draft, I wasn't really happy with it and wished I spent a little more time with it. But, I still like the idea, so here's a second shot. Hope you find it worthwhile. Someone reviewed that it sounded like I swallowed a dictionary, but in all honesty, that's just how I write at times. However, I don't like the construction and, in general, this is probably one of my worst attempts at a serious or reflective piece. Thanks for the criticism and here's hoping you like the rewrite better.**

**This is an alternate ending (read: slightly AU) to Season 2's episode 7, "Of Human Action," where Peter suffers brain trauma from the intentional accident and Olivia struggles to cope with it. **

**Warning: Rated T for language. In my mind, Olivia's inner monologue has a lot of swear words. Not sure why.**

**I hope you enjoy. And if not, I hope you find some joy elsewhere,**

**-Ari**

* * *

The lights from the ambulance thudded against the back of her skull in some weird, epileptic rhythm as it drove away with the unconscious kid. Some kind of abstinent terror glued her feet to the grass. All of the hallucinogens and caffeinated lack of sleep required by the job must have finally busted the brim of her sanity; this had to be a perverted daydream or a shitty joke her mind tried to make from the horrors that haunt her at night.

Peter was not moving.

_Please, God. Please tell me I'm hallucinating._

Her partner was on the grass with a bloodied head, a boneless body lost in a sea of frenzied feet. No one was stopping to help in their hurry, no one except the only person here just as likely to be hallucinating as she was.

"Peter, wake up, son," Olivia heard Walter breathe. "Peter, please. Wake up."

Walter shook Peter by the shoulders before cradling his face in his hands, she could hear him choking on the tears.

"Son, please, wake up. Just wake up!" Walter screamed. "Help! Peter, please. Help, anybody!"

_Please..._

"Medic," she said mechanically, her military faculties taking over while she continued to cry helplessly in her mind. Her feet were already moving towards her apparently dead partner before the real terror dropeds into the basin of her stomach.

"Medic!" she screamed, her voice finally catching up with her horror. "We need a goddamned medic here! Now!"

When no one responded to her curse-riddled demands, she lassoed an EMT by the collar with her fist and threw him towards Peter. After stumbling forward, the EMT realized that there's a lifeless lump of a man on the ground and stuck two fingers on his pulse point before yelling for his fellows.

"No pulse! We need another ambulance over here!"

Olivia dropped to her knees next to Walter, and it's a latent compassion that made her grab his hand as he was pushed back from his son. He rocked, back and forth, side to side, with hysteria spilling all over his face. Her face was frozen in a painful grip on her sanity, but inside, she wailed along with Walter.

"Not my son, please. Don't take him, don't take him, don't take him!" Walter cried, all in one breath.

_Don't take him. _

The medic screamed, "He's not breathing!" before the chest compressions started.

_1, 2, 3, 4..._

"Please! Oh, God! Please!"

_7, 8, 9..._

Another EMT dropped next to Peter with a defibrillator, the machine whining morosely as they try to revive him as precious seconds trickle away.

"Clear!"

One pump of electricity, his back arched violently, and Olivia's heart surged with hope. He crumpled, and she was sure a little piece of her was withering with each failed attempt to shove breath back into his lungs. It wasn't until the fourth try that the EMTs jump to their feet.

"We've got a beat! Move!"

Peter was gathered and piled onto a gurney and Olivia shoved Walter into the back of an ambulance to accompany his barely breathing son to the emergency room. She's left with the most disturbing notion of abandonment and a sickening belief that this, all of it, was her fault. And she knew that no guilty motivation, no self-loathsome sense of duty would help her make it right.

* * *

She followed the ambulance to the hospital, flashed her credentials without stopping to bother with the hospital personnel. When she entered the hall, she felt like she stepped into a wormhole into a world where time must be meaningless, because it wouldn't move. A warped reality hellbent on punishing her for the guilt she couldn't quite explain to herself.

It must have been hours since she first opened the door to his hospital room, the sight of a comatose Peter swaddled in breathing tubes and bandages more than to still her pursuit. Walter had long since been carted back to some safe haven she didn't bother to ask about. She stood alone, watching the blips on the pulse line of his cardiac monitor. Each mechanical bleat paired itself with a crescendo of grief and guilt in her. The gulp she forced down her esophagus sounded like an explosion, a nuclear blasts that rose from the back of her throat to the top of her skull, amplified by the silence in the sepulchre-like room. She couldn't find it in herself to take a step towards him, to touch him, to know if his body was still warm and if he was still alive under this blanketing coma. There was a divide here she couldn't cross for fear the depth of it might unapologetically and rightfully consume her. Worst of all was the certainty, the quantifiable absolute that she caused this. If someone were to design a riddle to divine the rhyme or reason for this carnage, the compass needle would always chase her and her compulsion to flee. She knew it, knew how but not why.

_Why?_

She considered him from her post near the door and she could feel the anger and contrition thinking about how Tyler invaded him and commanded all the control that she knows Peter has to had to function. She could almost hear the latent conscience housed in his amygdala, screaming at him for the things he had done, breaking the strings that play the tune that informs everything that he is and has become. Shooting Broyles, attacking the officer, and whatever other god-forsaken horrific mandates the kid shoved him through in his sick puppet show. She cursed herself for not noticing that he had been taken and, fate or God or whatever unseeable forces pull those strings, she wanted it to go fuck itself.

She imagined cracks running through the marbled identity the past year has crafted for him, and she could feel her heart breaking. There was something osmotic, deafening and suffocating, about the sorrow of losing him and this fortress they had built for themselves over the last two years. She could feel the bricks falling with each pulse of the monitor. Because if he was broken, then surely she would break, too?

_Why Peter?_

She swerved back out the door, to the bathroom or anywhere there wasn't a dying man in front of her, objectified by compassion that she didn't think she could articulate, not even to herself. Care for him was laced so firmly under her skin, she had long since stopped trying to deny it existed.

But of one thing, she was certain: this was not love. Love was an unearned impossibility at this point. A million reasons that the world kept pushing through like daisies through dirt would never let her love him like she had tried to love John Scott. Two incompatible pasts shouldn't and couldn't make a happy future. This was a contract bonded by necessity and fortified by guilt-ridden amendments. And it was a monster raging inside of her head and gut that she didn't even know how to begin to tame.

She stopped in the mercifully empty hallway, her echoing footfalls finally catching up to her. She imagined a shelled cynical version Peter from years past telling her that love does not exist. Not really.

_It is a social coping device,_ he would tell her,_ an anthropological leveling mechanism meant to separate our instinctual habits from our animalistic fellows. A badge that we give to hormonal impulses simply because they are human._

It was something akin to an epiphany when she realizds that she could never actually imagine him saying this, not now, and how remarkable the change in him was. He's been all civic duty and good intentions for as long as she's known him once the acrimony fell away. He was a human case study against the tenants misanthropy.

_Behind every cynic is a frustrated romantic._

The reality of it scraped up the dregs of digestion and shoved them back up her esophagus; she emptied the curdled food and compunction into a bystanding trash can from the weight of it. Peter was mortally maimed while his sociopathic abductor rolled away with the slightest of injuries. When Peter swerved the car, he purposely angled the damage away from the kid. Even after his killing spree, Peter put more value in Tyler's life than his own.

It was a stifling slice of humanity, so pure it was painful. And she didn't know how she never allowed herself to see it before now, how she kept convincing herself that Peter was nothing more than a habitual cynic with marginal potential to be a better man. He'd broken through that ceiling a long time ago. She was suddenly ashamed of her ignorance, because the man deserved better. Maybe he always had. She didn't know anymore, and she didn't know how to even begin to atone for it.

It was suffocating in its omnipotence in her metaphorically fractured skull, a lone thought politicking to a quieted amphitheatre.

She noiselessly pushed back into stifling silence of his room and wished she could just hear him speak one simple word, and it wouldn't matter which one it was. She sat in the chair Walter refused to vacate hours earlier, taking only a little solace in the rhythm of his slow breathing. She remembered the first reality slap this clusterfucked attraction provided. She had wandered into the lab in January. Already breathless from the chill, she had almost stopped breathing when she first saw him that day, hovering over a slug with a plastic bagel knife and a pink apron.

"Olivia?" he found his way to her collapsed side to find her in a phthisic fit of laughter. "What in the hell are you laughing about?"

"You-you're operating with a plastic utensil and pink bakery garb," she stuttered out before erupting into another series of unfettered giggles. That day had been consumed in the flames of hell, and Peter's absurdity absolved it.

"I couldn't find the scalpel," he said weakly.

"Oh, shit, Peter," she almost cried from the force of her amusement. "I just saw your dad scrape someone off the sidewalk and try to have a normal conversation with Broyles, and somehow this is the most bizarre thing I've seen today."

She flattened to the floor on her back, letting the convulsive laughter roll over her, and it was intoxicating and infectious. Peter, kneeling beside her, finally joined her. And they laughed for awhile, like children without a burdensome past. She looked at him, the simple joy on his face was somehow beyond a qualifiable value. It was then, she now knew, that the job had become pointless without him. The sweetness of the memory mixed with her contrition and grief, a temperamental cocktail that boiled up from the bottom of her heart and blights the lining of her throat.

And it burned up every molecular piece of her body, every single cell lighting itself on fire in self-loathing arson, more than any bitterness or guilt she had ever thrown at herself.

She wrapped her fingers around his inanimate hand, trying to squeeze life from what felt like fading warmth.

"How could I tell you to be a better man than your father when you were already better than all of us?" she choked, pressing the back of his hand to her forehead. "I'm so sorry, Peter."


	2. Small Favors

**AN: A continuation. Thanks to Asha710 for betaing.**

**-Ari**

* * *

**Chapter 2: God lives for small favors**

_It is late when Olivia startles awake, the sensation of falling shaking her from her painfully light slumber. She had fallen asleep in a hard-backed chair next to Peter's hospital bed, her inherent guilt keeping her here late most nights. But it's the rustling of sheets that brings her back to full attention. Peter's whole body is moving, twitching and jerking. His head rolls, side to side, 180 degrees. His fingers flex open and closed near his thighs and his small kicks are creating ripples in the blanket that covers his lower half. She's up in a second and at his side, gripping the edge of the bed._

_He's clenching his teeth and grunting like he's in pain. Two instincts, elation to see him move after weeks of lifelessness and anxiety at his apparent anguish, grapple in her chest, She reaches out to touch his shoulder, her fingers so unsure that she might not even be touching him at all._

_"Peter?" she whispers. "Peter, can you open your eyes?"_

_And she's pretty sure her heart might give out when he actually does. There is a blindness in his eyes, a hazy membrane separating his consciousness from the Peter Bishop that she is trying to reach, trapped somewhere under this comatose cocoon. She finds herself begging some higher power for him to see her, to know that she is here and to feel her unrelenting remorse._

_"Peter? Can you hear me?"_

_"Liv?"_

_His voice is strained and soft and injured, but he's here somewhere and Olivia's heart thuds in her throat as she hears Walter's loud upheaval from his own slumber. _

_"Liv? Where is dad?"_

_Walter joins them on Peter's other side._

_"Here, son. I am here, you beautiful boy! I am here!"_

_Peter's head jerks towards Walter and his eyes widen and his heart rate pushes the monitor to beep erratically. He looks back Olivia and she aches._

_"Liv. Scared. I'm scared."_

_His eyelids slide back over their sockets and his body stills. Olivia's heart swells a thousand times its natural size before it sinks to the pit of her stomach, as Walter runs and yells into the hallway before dropping to his knees._

_"My son. My son!"_

* * *

Peter had been responding to stimuli for weeks - a squeeze of Olivia's hand or contracting eyelids when Walter would sing him lullabies - before he finally began to wake up. It had taken several days, several heart-achingly long days as Peter fell and rose out of his coma again and again. It felt like a purgatorial sequence every time he opened his eyes, an endless reprise of hope and doubt as he would begin to speak in fragments and incomplete thoughts, then fall under again. He was scared, he would tell her. He didn't understand. Where was he? Help him. Please.

It was all she could do to squeeze his hand, whisper comforting ideas and keep herself from sobbing uncontrollably from the sheer frustration from the omnipotence of this pain._ I'm here, I'm here. You're doing so good, Peter. Come back to us. We miss you. We want you. We need you._

It was an endless mantra, and she would say it until he walked out of this god-forsaken place. She felt a little selfish as she realized that she was here just as much for herself as she was for him. The realization was more frightening than anything she'd seen during her day job.

At first, he hardly resembled the man she had come to know and reluctantly appreciate, and she hated herself for her impatience. But as the days ticked by, his memory and his character slowly trickled back from wherever his genius brain stored his reserve of sarcasm and wit. Walter was daily in his impetuous demands for Peter's release so that he could run his own tests and ensure longevity in his wellness, but the doctors continually refused, sharing ominously condescending looks behind the mad scientist's back. Olivia mused that she would sympathize for Walter, maybe even defend his honor like the perverse version of a white knight she has forced herself to become. But not today and not tomorrow. She couldn't find the energy with all her reserves spent on Peter and wondering if she will ever stop hating herself this much.

After about a week, the only thing out of the ordinary was Peter's constant fatigue and his absence from the job. It was a frightening realization when she finally admitted to herself that she missed seeing his face break into that lopsided smirk that used to irk her so and craved to hear him chuckling at her for no reason at all. Where she used to squirm under his laser-like focus, she suddenly coveted the past intensity of their interactions. Peter was usually sleeping by the time she would get off work from a double shift to take care of the increased caseload, two geniuses short from the team. Walter was often vacant and listless during his time in the lab, which was abbreviated while Peter was in the hospital. He insisted on sleeping at the hospital.

So it was hardly unusual when Peter was sleeping when she finally made it to the hospital at dusk after a day of wrangling witness statements about a goo bomb in an airport that killed 12 people. She smelled like formaldehyde and she felt and probably looked like hell, but she drank in the calmness she felt here, knowing that Peter was finally healing. She could normally hear Walter snoring on the couch when she visited, but he was nowhere to be found. It was still, like it had been years since any movement had disturbed the atomic particles that made up the room's mass. She approached Peter noiselessly and sat on the edge of the bed near his hip, feeling a little bold in the silence of the room. This felt oddly intimate, and with no intruding eyes and minds, she finally let herself take comfort in it, whatever "it" was. She felt an odd surge of anxiety at his motionlessness and the tomb-like inertia of the room, putting a cool hand on his warm neck and finding his pulse. A living rhythm that flooded her with something oddly akin to hope.

She could feel his consciousness stirring before she saw it. A gentle hand curled around her wrist as she felt his heartbeat crescendo beneath her fingers as his eyes flickered open, and his stare stretched over a chasm in her universe: one where she could imagine life and the job without Peter, and one where she did not want to.

"Do you make it a habit to check the vitals of all the patients?" he said, his voice coated in rasp from lack of use, but spirited.

"I've seen you pull out that shit-eating grin with unspeakable weapons pointed at your face that could rip you apart the molecular level," she couldn't miss the chance to chide him, and it was comforting in some perverse way when that smirk appeared that she used to detest so much. "I'm surprised you let a little brain trauma stop you."

He pushed a chuckle through his dry throat, and Olivia felt a weird anxiety roll in her chest. She couldn't find it in herself to move her hand from his warm skin and he wasn't releasing her from his gentle grip on her wrist, and it was painfully gratifying to touch him. She must have been smiling at him, because his eyes were soft as they searched for something in her own.

"They only thing that's been stopping me is a blonde hardass with a common-sense problem," he said, meaning it in jest, but the softness in his voice was tugging at something deep in her that she had long ago thought dead, something she was still trying to bury. "I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm a little self-destructive."

This time, she laughed, her eyes crinkling against a well of unease and relief.

"Aren't we all?"

His smile was slow and easy, and like always, he stared at her for too long, squeezing her wrist in solidarity and something else that Olivia still couldn't bring herself to ask him about. She began mindlessly running her thumb along his jawline as his massaged her palm, still not ready to release him.

"I talked to the doctor on duty tonight," she said. "She said we can probably take you home tomorrow."

He paused, his eyes dropping to his hand as he traced Olivia's arm with his fingers, goosebumps rolling up her skin, until he finally mirrored her and cradled her chin.

"I think I'd rather stay right here."


	3. Well Wishes

**A/N: I got just a little inspiration from the lyrics of "Neon Cathedral" by Macklemore for the bar scene. If any of you are into rap at all, I would recommend it. It's a weirdly beautiful song.**

**Thanks to Asha for eyeballin' it.**

**-Ari**

* * *

She could feel the eyes on her, the thunk of her third empty glass on the wooden bar drawing the stares off all the barstool occupants in her periphery. Not to mention the bartender who, with a less judgmental glance, merely disappeared under the bar before resurfacing with her favorite brand of whiskey and began refilling her glass.

He'd already seen her, a time or two, drink her male colleagues under the table, literally and figuratively. It was an unspoken understanding between the two that she came here to search for solace at the bottom of a random whiskey glass in a quiet bar, and she would exit wordlessly when she failed. He didn't ask why or bother her about her consumption levels and she smiled genuinely and warmly at him when he enabled her charade. She never brawled or puked on his bar. She simply set her final drink down, usually the fifth or six, on top of a crisp $50 to cover her bill and an ample tip before slipping off the bar stool with a subtle nod and sad smile before heading out into the night, usually walking three blocks in the sobering chill to her home.

_Good night, Frank. I'll see you some time, _she would imagine herself saying.

'_Night, Olivia. You take care of yourself, _she could almost hear him reply, but their goodbyes were always confined to head tips or flaccid hand waves, their conversations almost exclusively limited to vague drink orders. He never asked her about the self-loathing furrow in her brow and she never asked him why he bothered with such poor company.

And despite her new burdens, tonight was no different.

"The usual?" he had said when she walked in, with a warm smile and gesturing to her normal spot at the bar.

"You know me too well," she responded in kind, intent on warming up the cushion and masking the roiling blight in her chest with the familiar burn of alcohol.

She had often fantasized about asking the barkeep about his family or his life outside these four walls, often imagined an intimate conversation about the shoe-sole scum they both are bound to encounter in their respective careers, but always refrained. Too often had her relationships, professional and private, become complicated by words and intel. There was no mystery to divine here at this bar top, no reason for investigation. Just the pursuit of penitence at this proverbial altar, a place where people weren't fellow agents or dead anomalies or mad scientists or the mad scientist's son, unable to flex his left hand and constantly looking at her probing blue eyes. There was an amiable man offering her a smile and another glass of whiskey and nothing more. If pressed, she would call him her friend, but only because of the latent kindness that he showed her and how he seemed to understand her solitary need when she came here.

And after the last month, she needed a moment of reprieve, a place where he wasn't looking her _like that_ every stubborn second of the day, where he wasn't silently posing the same question she asked herself every goddamned day of her life since Iraq.

_What do you want from me, Olivia?_

_He asks the question again, here, in this silent hospital room. He does and he doesn't, and certainly not with words, and she swears she can hear electrons burning the tracks of their atomic orbits. It's so quiet, and his eyes are mining her face for hints to supply to his occipital lobe so, maybe, he can begin constructing an answer. And, God, she can feel the panic squeeze her blood vessels. _

_His hand moves from her wrist to her face, and the fact that his smile seems so sure makes her think that he might have finally figured it out. And it terrifies her, because she's still not sure that she knows anything anymore_

"_I think I'd rather stay right here."_

_And there it is. A declaration of something, although if she is entirely honest, she's still not sure what. He's giving her something, and he wants something in return, but she has nothing at the moment. If this is her searchlight, she is still wandering. _

"_Peter!" Walter bursts into the room, a sheepish looking Astrid in his wake. "Aster brought us _red vines!"

_Peter drops his hand from its gentle treatment on her jaw and she slides off the hospital bed like it's nothing, but somewhere in the back of her mind she is berating herself. She feels the inevitability of this friendship weighing hard on her chest and her conscious, and it's either going to be a leap of faith or a slow-burn to combustion. And somehow, she still doesn't trust it. _

"_I found him harassing a nurse about the vending machine on the way in," Astrid said, scarcely concealing the fatigue in her voice. "I brought coffee. Can Peter have coffee?"_

_She takes the proffered cardboard mug from the junior agent._

"_Thank God for you, Astrid," she says. _

You're a fucking angel, _she thinks. _

_Astrid holds up the last mug for Peter while carefully approaching his bedside._

"_You want? House blend, one creamer and two sugars, just how you like it," she offers it with a goading smile and he returns it radiantly, accepting the mug and taking a drag._

"_Thank you," he says, his voice raspy but warm. He takes another sip and his eyes return to Olivia and she's already there to meet his gaze. Half of her face is hidden behind the cup as she eyes him furtively over the plastic lid. But if he knows her, and he does, her meaning is crystalline._

I need more time.

She drained another glass as the bartender came back to refill it, either her last or next to last drink. There was comfort in this pattern, where others drew impassable lines around her sanity. As he emptied the bottle over her melted ice cubes, she felt satisfied.

_Whoever said you shouldn't settle for 'good enough' never had to brush a corpse into a dustpan. _

She had come to the bar with Peter several times before, if only because she craved to be cloaked in familiarity when investigating the unsolvable equation of her friendship with the younger Bishop. Outside of the office and the lab, she and Peter were something else entirely. Something not adequately described as "partners" or "friends," something she could not bring herself to name or define. But she knew this bar, could sink into the old and marred floorboards and almost feel like she was home. She could fight this battle on her own turf and at least have some prayer at a chance at victory. Peter came armed to the teeth with a lopsided smile and what she swore was a mission to strip her bare, metaphorically and maybe even literally. What his plans were after that, she could not yet climb that hill. So they sparred here, a war of wits and coy smiles. She wanted to believe with everything that at the end of it, there were, at the very least, good intentions. But that discovery required a white flag, a proposition that wholly terrified her and, _fuck_, she hates feeling afraid. More than anything, she hates feeling afraid of him.

She always sat in the booths when she came with Peter, saving the lone barstool for her selfish rendezvous with a whiskey glass and knowing smiles with the man behind the bar. The bartender would always flash her kind glances as a cocktail waitress set down their orders, a roulette of pub food and drinks that burn: an Irish coffee or at least a different brand of liquor, scotch or something equally as strong but without the familiar taste.

With or without Peter, the barman was always here on any random weeknight, carrying her temporary salvation and pouring it into a clean but battered glass. She knew every scar on the table tops of this dive bar, and the man was a fixture in her divine pursuit of comfort.

_Yes,_ she thought. _Definitely a friend. _

Her phone began chirping, cracking open her carefully distilled reverie.

"Dunham," she answered mechanically.

"Agent Dunham, this is Broyles," her superior said unnecessarily. He was the only one who would call her at this hour. The only other candidate for a late-night ring would not be making that call tonight. She took the last draw of her drink to wash out the sour taste that thought left as it sunk into her chest.

"What's the address?" she asked, mourning the fleeting burn in the back of her throat.

"No, there is no scene, Agent Dunham. I was simply calling to tell you that you did outstanding work today, and to ask you how you were holding up after the incident in the alley. How is your head?"

Olivia's fingers mindlessly found the coagulated wound nestled near her hairline, stretching like a lazy feline from her ear to the left side of her forehead. She pulled her hand away, almost dumbly expecting to find more blood on her fingertips.

"It's fine, sir," she reassured. "I'm fine."

"That is good to hear," he said, his monotone easily mistakable for ulterior motives for those who didn't know him. "I was also calling to tell you that there is nothing important on the agenda tomorrow, mostly paperwork and case reviews. If you needed to take a breather, a day or two—"

"Oh, no, sir, that won't be necessary," she bleated obligatorily.

"That's fine, Dunham," he said, almost exasperated. "All I'm saying is that if you wake up tomorrow and don't feel like dealing with this bullshit, if you look in the mirror and decide you'd rather spend the day getting that guilty look off your face, then you don't have to come in because I won't be expecting you."

She paused, mulling over his offer as she watched the bartender take another man's keys and pull out the phone to call him a cab. He turned, with the phone in his ear and raised an eyebrow at her, still on the line with Broyles.

_Look at us, Olivia. What a pair, what a pair, huh?_

"Thank you, sir," she said with a quiet smile.

"I'll just say 'See you Monday,' then," he said, and she chuckled in appreciation despite herself.

"Have a good night, sir."

"You do the same. And Dunham?"

"Yes?"

"Look after yourself."

She ended the call and watched the weeping ice cubes in her glass as she lifted it and deposited her $50 bill. She grimaced at the solemn look of hopelessness on Ulysses S. Grant's face before folding it in two and placing it under the glass. She fished out a piece of ice and savored the final taste of whiskey before the cube skated down her tongue and washed away the remnants. She slid off the barstool, the bartender turned towards her when he heard he feet hit the ground, a miracle amid the buzzing murmurs of other patrons.

"Good night, Frank, I'll see you sometime," she said with a small smile and an offered palm.

"Night, Olivia. You take care of yourself."

And with a jacket on her arm, she walked into the predictable cold of early February mornings and she found her way home.


End file.
